Paris Memoirs: Thumping Hemingway

Ernest and his boxing!....Ernest back in the States would say to Josephine Herbst, 'But my writing is nothing. My boxing is everything.' When Miss Herbst told this to me, I was full of wonder. That a great artist like Ernest could have such a view of himself seemed incredible. Yet in the strange dark depths of his being he had to pretend to believe it. For the sake of the peace of their souls most men live by pretending to believe in something they secretly know isn't true.
                                                                          Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris

One of the pleasures of reading memoirs of 1920s Paris is finding different, and contradictory, accounts of the same event. A good example of this is the 1929 boxing encounter between Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan, refereed by F.Scott Fitzgerald. This is the centrepiece of Callaghan's memoir, which Truman Capote described as 'a modest bad dull book which contains a superb short story about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Callaghan.'

Callaghan and Hemingway had become friends while they were both working as journalists on the Toronto Star. Hemingway admired Callaghan's writing, though he was not happy when the latter published a story about a prizefighter.

In a letter to a mutual friend, he made one critical comment....He told this friend that when Morley wrote stories about the things he knew, there was no one any better, but he should stick to the things he knew about. What was bothering Ernest? I wondered. Did he think that in writing about a fighter I had made an unworthy excursion into his own imaginary world? Was it because I had forgotten to tell him I had done a lot of boxing and went to all the fights?     

That Summer in Paris


When the two writers met again, in Paris in 1929, the first thing that Hemingway asked Callaghan about was boxing.

He turned to me as he sat down, and apparently at random, just to make conversation, asked if I had ever done any boxing. Yes, I had done quite a bit of boxing, I said truthfully. 'Just a minute', he said quietly and he left the room....Then Ernest reappeared with a set of boxing gloves. 'Come on, let's see,' he said holding out a pair of gloves to me.

The next day, they went to the American Club for a proper scrap.

Ernest was big and heavy, over six feet, and I was only five foot eight. Whatever skill I had in boxing had to do with avoiding getting hit. Admittedly I had a most unorthodox style, carrying my gloves far too low, counting on being fast with my hands....I soon found that I could hit him easily. Seeing that I was carrying my left far too low, he would half jab with his left, then try the right, but his timing was way off. I would draw him closer by feinting a step backward, inviting him to move in with his long left, then step in and beat him to the punch with my own left. His right, coming at me correctly was far too slow. I was catching him on the mouth or jaw. As the round progressed I became at ease and sure of myself. I could see that, while he may have thought about boxing, dreamed about boxing, consorted with old fighters and hung around gyms, I had actually done more actual boxing with men who could box a little and weren't just taking exercise or fooling around.  

On a later occasion, Callaghan made Hemingway's mouth bleed.

He loudly sucked in all the blood. He waited, watching me, and took another punch on the mouth. Then as I went to slip in again, he stiffened. Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood: he spat in my face. My gym shirt too was spattered with blood.
  I was so shocked I dropped my gloves....It is a terrible insult for a man to spit at another man. We stared at each other. 'That's what bullfighters do when they're wounded. It's way of showing contempt,' he said solemnly.
 
In Paris, Callaghan also got to know F Scott Fitzgerald, whose behaviour was even more bizarre than Hemingway's. At their first meeting, Fitzgerald talked about a number of writers he admired, none of whom impressed Callaghan.

He smiled sweetly, his head on one side again, as he considered some grave problem....Then half to himself, 'Who does impress you, Morley?'
  My face began to burn....before I could speak, stand up, make the necessary polite little remarks, Scott himself stood up slowly. 'Would this impress you, Morley?' he asked sweetly.
  Suddenly he got down on his knees, put his head on the floor and tried to stand on his head. One leg came up, and he tried to get the other one up and maintain his balance....Then he lost his balance and sprawled flat on his face.

Fitzgerald was impressed by tales of Hemingway's boxing.

Scott began to repeat to me the story...about Hemingway jumping into the ring and knocking out the middleweight champion of France. He told it as if he were letting me in on something and he sounded a little awed. I could hardly conceal my exasperation. 'Do you really think Ernest is that good?' I asked.
...With a judicial air he pondered, 'Ernest is probably not good enough to be the heavyweight champion, ' he said gravely. 'But I would say that he is about as good as Young Stribling.'
  Young Stribling was a famous first-class light heavyweight who was so good he was forced to fight heavyweights. 'Look Scott,' I said to him. 'Ernest is an amateur. I'm an amateur. All this talk is ridiculous. But we do have fun.'
  Not convinced at all, he shook his head. But then at last he said it; what he had been wanting to say for weeks. 'Could I come along with you sometime?' 

So, a week later, Callaghan and Hemingway were squaring off at the American Club, while  Scott Fitzgerald held a watch, timing two minute rounds. The presence of Fitzgerald made Hemingway fight more recklessly than usual.

Ernest got careless; he came in too fast, his left down, and he got smacked on the mouth. His lip began to bleed....Out of the corner of his eye he may have seen the shocked expression on Scott's face...He came lunging in, swinging more recklessly....Ernest, wiping the blood from his mouth with his glove, and probably made careless with exasperation and embarrassment from having Scott there, came leaping in at me. Stepping in, I beat him to the punch. The timing may have been just right. I caught him on the jaw; spinning around he went down, sprawled out on his back.
 ....Shaking his head a little to clear it, he rested a moment on his back. As he rose slowly, I expected him to curse, then laugh.
  'Oh my God!' Scott said suddenly. When I looked at him, alarmed, he was shaking his head helplessly. 'I let the round go four minutes,' he said.
  'Christ!' Ernest yelled. He got up....'All right Scott,' Ernest said savagely. 'If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake' and he stomped off to the shower room to wipe the blood from his mouth.

That's Callaghan's own version of the fight. Here's the story reported by John Glassco.

Morley was babbling quietly....Bob had taken him to see Joyce; and his new novel was almost finished. But he was especially pleased to have boxed with Hemingway, and to have either knocked the great man out or given him a nosebleed – it wasn't clear which. He was thrilled by this triumph, though he played it down modestly; in his quiet way he was able to invest the experience with a certain mystical quality. It was clear it was a major event.
  'Well,' said Graeme after he had gone, 'I'm glad he pasted Hemingway.'
  We agreed it was peculiarly fitting that the master had been bested in the ring by a man smaller and stouter than himself.
                                                John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse

Robert McAlmon also heard all about it.

The famous Callaghan-Hemingway bout that took place in 1929 was reported to me several ways: by Hemingway, by Callaghan, and by Scott Fitzgerald. Callaghan's report was that Scott was to referee, and they were to have three or four two minute rounds. Hemingway was the taller and heavier man. Callaghan, actually, was short and inclined to a look of flabbiness and rotundity. Scott was sure that Hemingway only needed to play with Callaghan, and let him down easily, without showing him up in a mortifying way.  The first round did not turn out that way, however, and so Scott forgot to tell time....Hemingway's story was that he had been drinking the night before and was boxing on three pick-me-up whiskies, and that his wind gave out. The decision results were, however, that neither Hemingway not Callaghan could decide what the bout proved. Was one a better boxer but not so good a writer as the other, or was one a better writer and boxer, or had Scott framed one or other of them?
                                                              Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together

Hemingway told a very different story to Samuel Putnam, the American translator of Cervantes, who wrote yet another memoir.

He was quite excited over a boxing match which he had staged with Morley Callaghan, who was passing through Paris...Callaghan, it seemed, had defeated him in a set of tennis and he had to have his revenge. They accordingly had put on the gloves in the basement of Hemingway's house, and Ernest, by his own account, had 'knocked hell out of' his opponent. He appealed to Mrs Hemingway to corroborate this, and it seemed to me that she treated him somewhat as one might a bright and loveable child. But it was plain that for him this was another of life's important exploits.

Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress, 1947

That Summer in Paris has a postscript to the story. A few months after the boxing encounter, Callaghan, back in New York, picked up a copy of the New York Herald Tribune, and turned to Isabel Paterson's gossip page.

My eye caught Hemingway's name, then my own. This story was about my meeting Hemingway in Paris. According to this story Hemingway, sitting at the Dome when I came along, told me the story I had written about a prize-fighter was no good; it was obvious I knew nothing about boxing. And there and then he challenged me to a match. I had knocked him out in one round.

Callaghan wrote a letter to the paper saying the story was not true, but then received a cable, collect, from Fitzgerald:

HAVE SEEN STORY IN HERALD TRIBUNE. ERNEST AND I AWAIT YOUR CORRECTION

Callaghan wrote a furious letter back

I told him it had been unnecessary for him to rush in to defend Ernest. For him to hurry out and send that cable to me collect without waiting to see what I would do was the act of a son of a bitch and I could only assume that he was drunk as usual when he wrote it.
  Finally I heard from Ernest. The letter was a beauty....He took the entire responsibility for sending of the cable to me....If I wanted to switch to him the abusive terms I had directed at Scott, he was coming to the States shortly and would be at my service wherever it could be kept private.
  So Ernest wanted to meet me and knock my block off!

All this is a long way from James Joyce, whose own attitude to boxing was described by his brother, Stanislaus:

My brother detested rugby, boxing and wrestling, which he considered a training not in self-control, as the English pretend, but in violence and brutality.  
                                                                                           My Brother's Keeper, 1958 

The artist, Harland Miller, hits the nail on the head

 

Paris Memoirs: Robert McAlmon

The most vivid and entertaining character in Memoirs of Montparnasse is Robert McAlmon. After finishing Glassco's book, I got hold of McAlmon's own memoir, which has the characteristically witty and self-confident title, Being Geniuses Together.  It was originally published by Secker and Warburg in 1938. 
 

Robert McAlmon is almost forgotten now, but he was a key figure in 1920s Paris. He wrote short stories and poems and founded Contact Editions, publishing Hemingway's first book, among many others. He was James Joyce's financial supporter, occasional typist and regular drinking companion.   
 

'He attracted people, and I knew few who did as much....Somehow he dominated whatever group he was in. Whatever café or bar McAlmon patronized at the moment was the one where you saw everybody....His talents made him one of the most interesting personalities of the twenties. His ample means, unique in the Bohemian world, contributed not a little to his popularity. The drinks were always on him, and alas! often in him.'

 Sylvia Beach,  Shakespeare and Company

 

Bryher and McAlmon

McAlmon's 'ample means' came from an extraordinary piece of good luck. In 1920, while working as a nude model for Cooper Union art classes in New York, he met the poet Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the richest man in England. According to the terms of a will, Bryher needed a husband in order to get her inheritance. McAlmon agreed to an arranged marriage, which allowed Bryher to escape from her strict parents and live abroad with her true love, the poet Hilda Doolittle. In return for a generous allowance, all McAlmon had to do was visit the Ellermans a few times a year with Bryher, keeping up the pretence that they were living together in Paris. After their divorce, in 1927, he received a big settlement from Sir John, which led Hemingway to nickname him 'Robert McAlimony'. (Hemingway hated McAlmon, describing him in a letter to F.Scott Fitzgerald as 'a son of a bitch with a mind like an ingrowing toenail'. McAlmon thought Hemingway was a big phony).

McAlmon's first publication was his own book of short stories, based on his childhood in Dakota. The title was suggested by Joyce, according to McAlmon 'because he found my American use of language racy.' It's more likely that it was because the stories looked like they were written in haste! Joyce told the writer, Morley Callaghan, 'He has a talent, a real talent; but it is a disorganized talent.' 

You can see how disorganized he was in his own account of typing the Penelope episode of Ulysses for Joyce:

'He gave me the handwritten script, and his handwriting is minute and hen-scrawly; very difficult to decipher. With the script, he gave me four notebooks, and throughout the script were marks in red, yellow, blue, purple, and green, referring to phrases which must be inserted from one of the notebooks. For about three pages I was painstaking, and actually retyped one page to get the insertions in the right place. After that I thought, 'Molly might just as well think this or that a page or two later, or not at all.' and made the insertions wherever I happened to be typing. Years later, I asked Joyce if he'd noticed the mystic arrangement of Molly's thought, and he said he had, but agreed with my viewpoint. Molly's thoughts were irregular in several ways at least.'

Here's McAlmon's opinion of Ulysses:

'The book is dull. It takes a person highly curious about life and letters, one of those supermorons, an intellectual, to read it through.' 

Here he is on Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake):

'Work in Progress went beyond the beyond. It was nice to hear him read it in that soothing Irish tenor, but to read pages of that punning, sentimental-remembering, meandering-wondering about life-death-birth, naughty jokings and flippant obscenities, was quite beyond my capacity.'

Even so, McAlmon agreed to write an article about the book for transition:

'Having been urged to write the article by Sylvia Beach and Joyce, I read it to Joyce to see if he would mind it. The wily Mr Joyce saw that all the 'he hopes he has done this' or 'he endeavours to' phrases were legpulling.' 

There's the same irreverent attitude in this description of the 1931 reading of the French translation of the Anna Livia Plurabelle passage in Adrienne Monnier's bookshop:

He had a profile like John Barrymore's

'It is indeed a ghastly thing to observe the ghouls, the frustrated old maids of various sexes, the dandruffy young men, and the badly dressed young women who clutter up literary gatherings....The whole crew sat about with expressions painted on their faces that made one feel one was in Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum....We were packed in. It was impossible to escape. Seeing the worshipful, masklike  faces, I lifted my hands for a second in a gesture of prayer....An old man rushed across the room and slapped me in the face. I was naturally disconcerted, but decided that if the old man felt that holy about the session it was his right....
  It was not until the next day that I learned who the old man  was....It was Monsieur Dujardin, an aged French author who is supposed to have originated the inetrior monologue....But it was not because of my lack of reverence for the reading that he slapped me. It appears that his wife has very thick ankles, and the old man is touchy about that matter. He thought I had looked down at her feet and put my hands up in mock horror.'

The book is especially valuable for the revealingly human portrait of Joyce, who used formal manners as a defence in most situations, but let his guard down with McAlmon. There are many descriptions of drinking sessions.

'It was impressive to observe how everything was grist to his mill. He was constantly leaping upon phrases and bits of slang which came naturally from my American lips, and one night, when he was slightly spiffed, he wept a bit while explaining his love or infatuation for words, mere words....
  Almost every night Joyce and I met for aperitifs, and...at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home at any hour. We talked of the way a free mind can understand the possibility of all things: necrophilia and other weird rites. We agreed in disliking mysticism, particularly the fake and sugared mysticism of many poets and writers. We spoke of what a strange man Robert Burton must have been to have compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy, and he didn't know in the end a bit more about it than we did. Sir Thomas Browne, not to speak of Ezra Pound and Eliot and Moore and Shaw we discussed, but sooner or later Mr Joyce began reciting Dante in sonorous Italian. When that misty and intent look came upon his face and into his eyes I knew that friend Joyce wasn't going home till early morning....

  The Gypsy Bar was usually our late night hangout. The patron and the 'girls' knew us well, and knew that we would drink freely and surely stay till four or five in the morning. The girls of the place collected at the table and indulged in their Burgundian and Rabelaisian humors....Joyce watching, would be so amused, but inevitably there came a time when drink so moved his spirit that he began quoting from his own work or reciting long passages of Dante in rolling sonorous Italian....Lewis sometimes came through with recitations of Verlaine, but he did not get the owl eyes and mesmerising expression upon his face which was automatically Joyce's. Amid the clink of glasses, jazz music played badly by a French orchestra, the chatter and laughter of the whores, Joyce went on reciting Dante....

  In those days, and for some three years later, I didn't have hangovers. Only once, after a particularly mad assortment of drinks, I had to struggle to a lamppost and relieve myself, and Joyce said solicitously, 'I say McAlmon, your health is rather delicate. Maybe they'll be saying I'm a bad example to you.''

Being Geniuses Together, 1938

The Gypsy, long gone, was in Rue Cujas in Montparnasse.  There's a memory of Joyce and McAlmon's drunken nights there in Finnegans Wake, where a drunk Shem is boasting to a fellow writer 'he used to pal around with... in the porch way of a gipsy's bar...that he was avoopf (part me!) aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard....as what he fancied or guessed the same as he was himself...and that...he would wipe alley English snooker....off the face of the erse.' 178.20-179.07

On several occasions, McAlmon had to carry a drunk Joyce home to the long-suffering Nora.

''Jim, you've been doin' this for twenty years, and I'm tellin' you it's the end. Do you understand? You've been bringin' your drunken companions to me too long, and now you've started McAlmon in the same way.' '

Here's a story McAlmon heard from the publisher Bill Bird, about the end of an all-night drinking session at Fouquet's:

Bill Bird, who carried Joyce up five flights

'At about five in the morning Bird had managed to get Joyce into a taxi and they drove to Joyce's apartment. The apartment was five flights up and the elevator was not working. When helped out of the taxi, Joyce flopped (I know that one too.) Bird, who is by no means a hefty individual, and who was a bit of a wreck from work and worry, carried him up the five flights and felt weak and trembling at the top. Once there however, Joyce could stand up. He could even unlock the door of his apartment and enter. Once inside, he went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sulkily refused to come out.
  Just before closing the bathroom door, however, he turned to Bird and said, 'You see how it is, Bird. I have brought them through the war and now they threaten to leave me.'....Nora pled; Bill argued and cajoled, but it was a quarter of an hour before Joyce would come out of the bathroom. 'Mr Bird, what are you to do with such a man?'  said Nora. 'And to think I have put up with him like this for all these years. What a damn fool his admirers would think me if they knew it all! He may be a genius to them, but look at him, what is he to me?''

Here he describes a St Patrick's Day party at the Trianon: 

'Joyce sang songs...and I broke loose with my 'Chinese Opera'. Joyce wanted me to sing it, and I did. It is the corncrake and the calliope wail of a Chinese virgin in a snowstorm, not understanding where she got her newborn babe, and the neighbour's son claims it is not his inasmuch as he never saw her before. This is a performance that has had me thrown out of several bars and most respectable households and the police of various stations know it well.
  Later, when we left, Joyce wanted to climb up the lamppost. He fancied himself various kinds of dancers, tap, Russian, and belly. Nora was there however, and protest as Mr Joyce might, she got him into a taxi, and, despite his bitter wailings and protestations, drove him home. '

McAlmon was so thick-skinned that he did not suspect that Joyce would mind being written about like this. He even read the manuscript to Joyce over several afternoons, expecting him to like it!  Joyce, who had always protected his respectable public image, was mortified, though he hid his feelings in front of McAlmon. According to Ellmann, he told his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver (who already strongly disapproved of his drinking), that the book made him feel 'actionable'.  

He read the work to Joyce, who mistook his honesty for maliciousness and called it an 'office boy's revenge'.
            Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company

Joyce's response to the book is in Gorman's authorised biography, which you can read about here.

Paris Memoirs: John Glassco

Seeing Midnight in Paris got me reading memoirs of the Lost Generation, the American writers who settled in Paris in the 1920s. I started with John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970).

Here's the cravat-wearing 'Buffy' Glassco, holding a martini. What an image of an aesthete! What a splendid author shot!

Glassco, a Canadian poet, was just eighteen when he arrived in Paris in 1928. He got to meet all the leading writers there, including James Joyce. More than thirty years later, he wrote this book, which he pretended he'd written at the time. Glassco was something of a trickster, and the book is partly fiction.

As a picture of bohemia, it reminded me of Julian McLaren-Ross's Memoirs of the Forties and Daniel Farsen's Soho in the Fifties. As an imaginative recreation of a writer's youth, it's as good as Patrick Leigh-Fermor's A Time of Gifts. Like Leigh-Fermor, Glassco makes his teenage self more erudite and sophisticated than he could possibly have been.

The result is a great book about being young, carefree and promiscuous, in what was then the world's most exciting city. Glassco, who also wrote pornographic novels, has lots of sexual encounters, with men and women. In the lesbian Gypsy Bar ('a little foul smelling boite on the boulevard Edgar Quinet'), he meets 'Daphne Berners' (Gwen Le Galienne) and 'Angela Martin' (Yvette Ledoux), who take him back to their studio, where they play records and make love.

Our amours, which were rather outré, were accompanied by an astonishing variety of music, from the happy melodies of Offenbach to the nasal breathy voice of Rudy Vallee and the silver snarling trumpet of Purcell. We all fell asleep soon after midnight, with the stove glowing softly and the stained moonllght silvering the high wall of the garden outside.

Robert McAlmon, Glassco and Graeme Taylor

In the Coupole, Glassco and his best friend, Graeme Taylor, are picked up by the charismatic bisexual writer, Robert McAlmon. Then Ernest Hemingway arrives.

A burly, moonfaced man, dressed in baggy tweeds and with his necktie clewed by a gold pin...came noisily into the bar and greeted our table with a loud, 'Well, Bob, up to your old tricks again?'

  McAlmon's sallow face turned pink. 'If it isn't Ernest, the fabulous phony! How are the bulls?'

 'And how is North America McAlmon, the unfinished Poem?' He leaned over and pummelled McAlmon in the ribs, grinning and blowing beery breath over the table....

  'It's only Hemingway,' said Bob loudly to both of us. 'Pay no attention and he may go away.'

 .... I found (Hemingway) almost as unattractive as his short stories – those studies in tight-lipped emotionalism and volcanic sentimentality that, with their absurd plots and dialogue, give me the effect of a gutless Prometheus who has tied himself up with string. 

Glassco is equally unimpressed by Gertrude Stein, whom he encounters while gatecrashing her party: 

Gertrude Stein projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability; her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress, were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down.

At Stein's party, Glassco gets into a lively discussion about Jane Austen. 

I was suddenly aware that our hostess had advanced and was looking at me with piercing eyes.

 'Do I know you?' she said. 'No. I suppose you are just one of those silly young men who admire Jane Austen.'

 .... Already uncomfortable at being an uninvited guest, I found the calculated insolence of her tone intolerable and lost my temper.

  'Yes I am,' I said. 'And I suppose you are just one of those silly old women who don't.'

  The fat Buddha-like face did not move. Miss Stein merely turned, like a gun revolving on its turret, and moved imperturbably away.

  

McAlmon and Glassco in Nice

In another scene, McAlmon, Joyce's closest friend in Paris, takes Glassco to visit him:

One day he suggested we go and see James Joyce. 'He's all alone and there's some kind of eye operation coming up, so the old Irish tenor's not feeling his oats. He said to bring along anyone I wanted. But don't talk about his work; we'll just get a little stinko together. Now's the time, when Nora's not there....And whatever you do, don't ask him what he's going to call his Work in Progress. He has a bee in his bonnet that he'll never finish it if he tells anyone what it's called.'

  'I can't make head or tail of it anyway.'

 'Good, tell him that if you get a chance. He'll like it.' 

 'What do you think of it yourself?'

 'If he thinks it's good, it's good enough for me.' 

Here's Glassco's first sight of the great man:

He was almost as distinguished looking as in his posed portraits; but the thin twisted mouth was now little more than a slit, the bibulous nose was pitted with holes like a piece of red-coloured cork, and the little goatee looked affected and out of place; his eyes were almost invisible behind thick glasses.... he was reserved, charming, gracious, and his voice was music. He had a good figure for clothes but was wearing a very badly cut suit.  

  The chilled wine was a coarse Niersteiner – light, dry and aromatic. Joyce sipped it with gormandise.

  'I'm getting on well with the oeuvre grandissime,' he said. 'You'll be seeing another piece of it in Mr Jolas's little magazine soon. Tell me now, McAlmon, do you still like it?'

  Bob jerked himself around in his chair. 'It's great, sir, simply great. It has got a wonderful flowing quality of Molly Bloom's thoughts, only it's got more variety. In a few years nobody'll be able to write a book in English any more, the words will be out of date.'

 Joyce shrugged deprecatingly. 'Oh no.'

A wide ranging conversation follows, covering puns, schoolteachers, nuns, the English novelist Richardson (described by Joyce as 'a remorselessly cruel spider') and Madame Bovary.  

    

As we went home I told Bob I had never thought of Joyce as an original critic.

 'Oh the old Irish tenor's got sides to him that don't show in his writing,' he said. 'Too bad he's gone off the deep end with language.'   

I loved this book so much that I bought several more copies to give to friends and family.

 

Midnight in Paris

I enjoyed Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's fantasy about the Lost Generation of the 20s. The hero, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) goes back in time and gets to meet Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S.Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Dali, Man Ray and Picasso. 

But where was James Joyce?!

Joyce was king of literary Paris in the 20s - most of the others were just passing through. Apart from Stein, the American writers worshipped Joyce. When F Scott Fitzgerald met him, in 1928, he was so much in awe that he offered to jump out of the window in homage!

Following his meeting with Joyce, Fitzgerald drew this cartoon in Sylvia Beach's copy of The Great Gatsby. Beach, shown as a siren or mermaid, sits at the right beside Joyce, who wears a halo, receiving the worship of a kneeling Fitzgerald. 

Hemingway also sought out Joyce and the pair became drinking companions. Joyce was one of the few writers Hemingway didn't fall out with.

Ellmann quotes two anecdotes from Hemingway:

We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say: 'Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!'

Once in one of those casual conversations you have when you're drinking, Joyce said to me that he was afraid that his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get a round a bit and see the world. Nora Joyce said, 'Ah Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunting.' Joyce replied, 'The thing we must face is that I couldn't see the lion.' His wife was not to be silenced: 'Hemingway'd describe him to you and afterwards you could go up and smell him. That's all you'd need.'

My other problem with Woody Allen's film is the idea that Gil would ask for literary advice from Gertrude Stein, who is shown as a great sage. 

Here's part of an interview with Stein, in which Wambly Bald asked her what she thought of James Joyce:

'He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence is however local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day.'
Bald: 'You feel then, Miss Stein, that your place in literature is secure?'
Stein: 'My place in literature? Twentieth-century literature is Gertrude Stein.'

Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank 1929-33

Would you ask her to read your novel?